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Stress

If a person feels emotional distress - anger, anxiety or depression - she or he may be experiencing acute stress. That's only one kind of stress, probably the most manageable. Other physical symptoms can include headache, heart palpitations and bowel problems. Chronic stress is worse. It happens when a person never sees a way out of a miserable situation. This can wear people down and even kill them through suicide, violence, heart attack, stroke and, perhaps, even cancer, the American Psychological Association says.

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Many people who experience chronic feelings of anxiety about social situations, work and relationships, or other aspects of everyday life often reach for a beer or a glass of wine to quell their unease.

History shows that the suicide rate tends to rise as the economy falls, but due to a lack of solid data, researchers haven't been able to confirm whether that pattern has held during the most recent economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression.

Gillian Aldrich started growing vegetables in her backyard three years ago, and she's now working on planting a bed of hydrangeas, butterfly bushes, rose campion, and -- her favorite -- pale-pink hardy geraniums along one side of her property.

She was a mother of three living in a small apartment and working four jobs. And then, as if in a fairy tale, she won her state's lottery last year. But the story doesn't have the happy ending you might expect.

I want to address a spate of criticism I received for my suggestion several weeks back that family therapy might be a first intervention for a 6-year-old boy diagnosed with bipolar disorder who was demonstrating problematic behavior at home but not at school.

Unemployment. Single parenthood. Taking care of multiple young children. Millions of people deal with these challenges every day, but in some cases, they add up to something unthinkable: turning against one's own child.

Driving south from Ohio with his wife and two children on Thursday, Steve Daly stopped in Tennessee for what's advertised as the world's best ice cream. After ordering, he briefly switched out of vacation mode to check his e-mail on his phone.

A woman who'd lived two years after Hurricane Katrina in a 30-foot-long FEMA camper cried, calling herself "a survivor" and pleading with the audience to look out for one another. An official with a faith-based relief agency flew in from Washington, seeking jobs for the flood of volunteers who keep calling. An advocate for children reminded people not to overlook the oil disaster's youngest victims.

Young men with low IQs are much more likely than their peers to attempt suicide later in life, a new study has found. In fact, men with the lowest IQs are about four times more likely to attempt suicide as those with the highest, and the risk tends to go up as IQ drops.

As medical director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness as well as a child psychiatrist, I appreciate this opportunity to address some of the issues raised on May 11 by the California mother who asked, "Who can help my bipolar 6-year-old?"

Soon after Paul Coskie's bicycle collided with a car, it became clear to his mother that her son would be sick for a very long time, and indeed he was. The 13-year-old boy went into a coma for a month and spent six months total in the hospital.

People who experience serious head injuries often require days -- if not weeks -- of medical care to get back on their feet. For most of them, the mental aftershocks will last long after they've checked out of the hospital.

On Wednesday, Dr. Toni Eyssallenne was walking the aisle of a small makeshift hospital in Haiti run by the University of Miami when a patient beckoned to her. "I assumed she was in pain, so I walked over and asked her what was wrong," Eyssallenne told me. "But she said she wasn't in pain. She said she just wanted to tell me what happened to her. For the next thirty minutes, I listened to her story."

As Haitians struggle to recover from the devastation of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake, mental health experts caution that the most severe psychological effects won't take form until individuals' situations stabilize.

Athena Champneys, 37, has been in near-constant pain since 2003, when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain and tenderness. Her husband hasn't always been 100 percent sympathetic, however.

Ah, the holidays. 'Tis the season to move into the relationship danger zone. We get so stressed out about buying the right presents, staying within our holiday budget, or trying to please impossible in-laws that the tension inevitably spills over into our love lives.

Jordan Pittard, 14, remembers feeling anxious about his father being deployed with the U.S. Army in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. His mother, Lucille, a teacher, admits struggling to have enough time to work, take care of the house and talk enough to her kids.

They listen to tales of life's worst moments, but they can't go home and tell their spouses about what they've heard. Sometimes no amount of schooling is enough to shield them from taking on some of their patients' suffering.

By the time you hear your child's early-morning stirrings, you've probably already worked out for 90 minutes, meditated for 30, and enjoyed a healthy, balanced breakfast, which of course included a low-fat pomegranate smoothie. Why, there's nothing left to do besides jog happily over to your beloved offspring's room, sweep him out of bed, and shower him with all the joyous light, wonder, and oneness you're feeling with the universe.

As a large silver balloon floated its way over Colorado, millions of Americans spent hours glued to their televisions wondering if 6-year-old Falcon Heene, assumed to be inside the contraption, was alive.

Some children and teens are more likely than their peers to become addicted to the Internet, and a new study suggests it's more likely to happen if kids are depressed, hostile, or have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or social phobia.

Your therapist's name is ELIZA, and she interacts with you through text on a computer screen. However embarrassing or difficult your problem may be, ELIZA will not hesitate to ask you a question about it, or respond graciously, "That is very interesting. Why do you say that?"

About 1 in 7, or 13.5 percent of adults who encountered intense dust clouds after the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11 were later found to have asthma, compared with just 8.4 percent who had no dust cloud exposure, researchers in Atlanta and New York City reported on Tuesday.

Kim Mickens, 49, has always been the caregiver among her eight brothers and sisters. So when her mother, Delphine Mickens, was told she had Alzheimer's disease, Mickens took care of all the arrangements for her mother's care -- among them, she chose a nursing home not far from her place in Baltimore.

When Holly Betten, 28, came home from the hospital after a rough delivery, she had one day to adjust to her new life as a mom before her husband went back to working 12-hour days as a computer-software architect.

Divorce causes more than bitterness and broken hearts. The trauma of a split can leave long-lasting effects on mental and physical health that remarriage might not repair, according to research released this week.

There may be a reason that children's asthma rates are so high in urban areas. Youngsters with stressed-out parents and exposure to air pollution have a higher risk of asthma, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Amir was a salesman before being arrested and taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. During his time there, he says, he was forced to lay down in urine and feces, stay naked in his cell for days, and "howl like dogs do" while being pulled by a dog leash. According to his accounts, he was also sodomized with a broomstick and had his genitals stepped on.

A University of Georgia professor shot and killed his wife and two other adults in Athens, Georgia, in late April, according to police. A U.S. soldier fired on fellow troops in early May at a counseling center at a base outside Baghdad, Iraq, killing five comrades, according to authorities.

Although it may have been Jon and Kate Gosselin's unusual family that landed them a reality show, it is their marital problems-- to which much of their audience can likely relate-- that have made them a household name in recent weeks.

"Just the facts" has always been Lillian Waugh's motto. A historian and former professor of women's studies at West Virginia University, Waugh is a stickler for facts and details. And because she was always the "go to" person at WVU, she was constantly in demand -- and busy.

A middle-of-the-night fight, a surprise pullout from the Grammy Awards, leaked photos, a police investigation -- new pieces of the puzzle of the alleged assault of pop singer Rihanna by her boyfriend Chris Brown have been emerging since early February.

Just days after giving birth to her second child, Dr. Jane Dimer drove herself home from the hospital to find her then-husband in bed with another woman. He threw Dimer down the stairs, and she never saw him again until court.

Erin Krebs, M.D., once had a patient who spent the first eight minutes of his appointment telling her everything that was wrong with the past four primary care doctors he'd seen -- including one she knew personally and considers a "lovely person." "We know that doctors are not perfect," said Krebs, an assistant professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine. "But it's not a good start to spend a lot of time complaining about the past."

When she heard news of the Continental Airlines plane that plunged into a house in suburban Buffalo, New York, on Thursday night, killing 50 people, Jenny Gomez experienced a familiar feeling creep deep within her psyche. "It definitely sparked those old feelings of anxiety," she said.

Until recently, the Bilson household was under siege. Thirteen-year-old daughter Marissa, who has autism, ruled the roost, screaming shrilly until she got her way and enjoying special privileges that didn't extend to her siblings, Brittany, 15, and Brendan, 6.